Monday, September 15, 2008

A quick update: While we had hoped to publish our archive on wolf and werewolf folklore, Full Moon Night, on September 15 (today - the full moon - pretty tidy, yes?) , we simply need more time to complete our final review of submissions. It is a demanding business, running a small literary venue.

I would like to announce the publication date for Full Moon Night as the evening of Tuesday, October 14 - which is the next full moon night. We look forward (with a certain lycanthropic wildness in our eyes) to seeing all of you there!

Also, check out our fall poetry contest - it is about to start cooking....

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Some good news for the day: researchers in northern Queensland, in Australia, have stumbled upon several frogs in a creek. Why is this news of mythic import? Because we had thought the frog extinct - a victim of the fungus that is exterminating amphibian species around the world at a terrifying rate. This is the armoured mistfrog (what a beautiful, odd name!), in a photo belonging to James Cook University:

And here is an AP article detailing the find. And you can read an earlier editorial in Dante's Heart concerning the impending extinction of frogs here. The most exciting part about these frogs whose hearts are still beating in a creek in Australia, according to the AP article, is that all of the frogs that the researchers have located are infected with the fungus - however, they have survived, where others of their kind did not. (Similar cases have been found in the northeastern U.S., where certain frog species have proven capable of living with the fungus rather than dying from it.) Perhaps there is a clue here that may help biologists save the last of the world's frogs.

Certainly there is an epic tale buried in here, largely unheard by most, an unsung tale of the fight by biologists around the globe to save the frogs - those odd, curious creatures that live both on land and in water, and that many of us encountered first through Kermit or through pet tadpoles or a dozen green toys when we were little.

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

I fell in love with the lyrics to Annie Lennox's song "Into the West" (inspired by a passage in The Lord of the Rings) when I first heard them. So here is a video I found by accident today, a singing of "Into the West" in sign language - it looks as though the speaker is dancing with her hands, a poetry of the body. It is very beautiful, as is the narrative that prefaces this music video, telling of a person singing this song to a dying grandmother.

To live in a century that has such an articulate and expressive sign language, as well as a century with such poetry as is in those lyrics - is a blessing.

The Importance of Wonder and Wonder Stories

These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water. (G. K. Chesterton)

If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales. (Albert Einstein)

A scientist in his laboratory is not a mere technician: he is also a child confronting natural phenomena that impress him as though they were fairy tales. (Marie Curie)

If you happen to read fairy tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other--the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the core of ethics, is the core of the nursery-tales. (G. K. Chesterton)

The experience of wonder continually reminds us that our grasp of the world is incomplete. (Stephen Greenblatt)

It was because of wonder that men both now and originally began to philosophize. (Aristotle)

Benediction

This is not a gray world.

May your days be alive with the electrifying colors of God's presence and wonder.

May you look up and around you even in the midst of your burdens.

May you look for God's love in the faces around you, in the falling of rain, in the sound of footsteps in snow.

May you take in the colors of the life God gives you until your eyes and spirit ache with them.

May you be as a bride seeing in every hour the face of her Beloved.

May your wonder make the colors visible to those who walk with their heads down.

May your surprised joy and your devotion make the voice of God audible to those who walk with their pain loud in their ears.